The theme of this year’s list of my favorite new restaurants in New York City is: bigger. Some of the places I reviewed most enthusiastically this year were bigger versions of existing restaurants. I Sodi, where fans of Rita Sodi’s Tuscan cooking used to be packed in tighter than anchovies, moved around the corner and grew several sizes. Superiority Burger traded its six original burger desks (maximum occupancy: one) for an assortment of booths, counter seats, bar stools and cocktail tables inside a former coffee shop on Avenue A. Finally, it also has a kitchen large enough to contain some of Brooks Headley’s ideas.
We could debate whether I Sodi and Superiority Burger deserve slots on a list of new restaurants. Let’s not, though. Instead of letting them take up spaces that might have gone to entirely new businesses, I made the list bigger. This year, I’m writing about 12 favorite “new” restaurants instead of the 10 I’ve typically named.
Whether you see Torrisi Bar & Restaurant as the long-awaited resurrection of Torrisi Italian Specialties or as an original work addressing some of the same themes, it’s definitely way bigger. It’s got a long bar of green marble, two high-tops and an upholstered dining room, all wrapped around an open kitchen. Like some of my other favorites this year — Mischa, Hav & Mar, Naro and Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi — Torrisi has square feet to spare, and deploys multiple centers of activity across the space to create a sense of theater.
They all represent a style of dining that all but disappeared in 2020, 2021 and even parts of last year. Small, friendly joints in residential areas found ways to thrive in the WFH economy of the pandemic. Larger, more expensive spots, which often rely on business meals and out-of-town visitors, did not.
The New York real estate market is a wonderland of miniature spaces where diners sit shoulder to shoulder, too, like Foxface Natural’s skinny alley or Hainan Chicken House’s takeout counter supplemented by tables. But places like those are a constant in any market. Not so the grander restaurants, more of which have just opened or are coming any day now. Some, like Cafe Carmellini and Four Twenty Five, are too new to make this list, which draws from restaurants I’ve already reviewed. But they all suggest that the chef-centric, big-night-out restaurant, a genre that some people were writing off a year or two ago, is in the middle of a very healthy comeback.
★★The city’s most impressive source of Hainanese chicken at the moment is not the one that was singled out from among hundreds of vendors in Singapore and given its own stall in the multimillion-dollar Urban Hawker market in Midtown. It is instead this tiny Malaysian restaurant next to a cellphone store on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. To be sure, the chicken that comes wrapped in brown wax paper is somehow not as chicken-y as the glossy domes of aromatic chicken rice rolled up with it. But the complete package, including a cup of golden chicken broth and tiny portions of three super-focused sauces, is unbeatable. Did I mention that Hainan Chicken House also serves char kway teow, Penang prawn mee and a handful of other Malaysian standards? And that they are at least as good as the chicken rice?
4807 Eighth Avenue (48th Street), Sunset Park, Brooklyn; 347-365-3864; hainanchickenhouse.com.
★★The party at Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster Harlem has been going strong for 12 years and counting. It’s no great surprise, then, that with Hav & Mar, Mr. Samuelsson has built another perpetual-motion machine that showers endless good vibes on the notably diverse crowd that shows up early and stays late. (Well, late by post-pandemic standards, anyway.) What is unexpected, though, is the cooking. Under Fariyal Abdullahi, the executive chef, it’s fun, smart, fresh and liberated from geographical boundaries. Ms. Abdullahi reaches into other cultures for a global cuisine that’s distinctly new.
245 11th Avenue (West 26th Street), Chelsea; 212-328-8041; havandmar.com.
★★★The first year has been shaky, as Naro kept tweaking its hours and menu formats (dinner is now served every night, but lunch was canceled) to suit the distinctive rhythms of the Rockefeller Center concourse. The culinary vision, though, appears stable. The kitchen recasts traditional Korean dishes in modern, artfully understated forms. At Junghyun and Jeongeun Park’s first tasting-menu restaurant, Atomix, each dish seems designed to make your jaw drop. The nine-course dinners they offer at Naro are after something different — more like a slow, satisfied smile of recognition. Even if you miss the references, the smile still comes.
610 Fifth Avenue (West 49th Street), Rockefeller Center concourse, Midtown; 212-202-0206; naronyc.com.
★★Midtown used to be full of expense-account restaurants where you never had to worry that the steak or pasta would scare the sales team from Pottsville. Mischa is the opposite of those places. If you think something on the menu sounds familiar, chances are it’s been twisted beyond recognition. None of the pastas are remotely Italian, the deviled egg is treated like a dessert, and the sauce for the steamed halibut contains asafoetida. The tater tots are the size of hot dogs, and the hot dog is the size of a kielbasa. It’s also one of the most delicious and original things you can eat on or off Lexington Avenue.
157 East 53rd Street (Lexington Avenue), Midtown; 212-466-6381; mischa-nyc.com.
★★Moving a hit restaurant to a new address is notoriously hard to do. Rita Sodi could write a book on getting it right, based on her seamless transfer of I Sodi from a narrow slot on Christopher Street to a space on the corner of Bleecker and Grove Streets. The new I Sodi keeps the original’s stripped-to-essentials feel, even though it’s much bigger, with two dining rooms and a back garden. It’s handsome without any ornamentation. That applies to the entire menu, which was also transported intact from the first location: the papery fried artichokes, the pappardelle coated with butter and Meyer lemon zest, the pepper-strafed Cornish hen grilled under a brick, the semifreddo of toasted hazelnuts. Most of the cooking is drawn from Ms. Sodi’s Tuscan upbringing. All of it is sublimely sure of itself.
314 Bleecker Street (Grove Street), West Village; 212-414-5774; isodinyc.com.
★★Chintan Pandya became one of New York’s most distinctive restaurateurs by emphasizing the aspects of India’s cuisine that some of its chefs used to see as too messy or lacking in delicacy for restaurant dining — all the things they learned to clean up or smooth out or tuck out of sight. At Masalawala & Sons, he trains his sights on Bengali cooking, zeroing in especially on rustic dishes from the countryside. The lamb stew called kosha mangsho arrives in the aluminum pot it was cooked in, looking as blackened and dried out as if it had been forgotten on the back of the stove. It’s delicious, of course. Keema kaleji is ground lamb and liver cooked with cloves and black cardamom; you spread it on a fluffy piece of pao, then wait for the mustard oil to blow the back of your head off.
365 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn; no phone; masalawala.com.
★★★Behind an anonymous facade, Foxface Natural seems immune to outside pressure. It doesn’t play it safe, or even to put its name someplace outside where people walking along Avenue A might see it. Critics, including this one, have made a lot of David Santos’s kangaroo tartare, stirred with a rumbling African spice blend. The dish serves as a kind of warning sign: If it makes you nervous, you might want to leave before the camel course. But exotic meats aren’t really the point. Mr. Santos gets extraordinary flavors out of fluke and scallops, and striped bass, too. The last time I saw a restaurant with a similar sense of freedom and adventure was Momofuku Ssam Bar, when it had just started leaving burritos behind.
189 Avenue A (East 12th Street), East Village; no phone; foxface-nyc.square.site.
★★It’s not nearly as eye-of-newt as the name suggests, but there is something supernatural about Foul Witch. Carlo Mirarchi, the ringmaster of the three-ring circus in Bushwick that is Roberta’s, presents us with Italian food that seems to come out of a strange, Lynchian dream. Agnolotti are filled with oozing taleggio that’s been seasoned with inky drops of phytoplankton.
(Source: The New York Times)